Monthly Archives: April 2022

Emily St. John Mandel and Jia Tolentino Look at the Future – ELLE

Posted: April 4, 2022 at 3:15 pm

Waistcoat, $2,595, blouse, $1,185, Simone Rocha.

Marco GIannavola

When have we ever believed that the world wasnt ending? asks a character in Emily St. John Mandels Sea of Tranquility. Theres always something. At a time when that fear is so acutely alive, the question is revelatory.

Depending on how you look at it, Emily St. John Mandel is either a remarkably prescient writer or simply a student of history who recognized that pandemics are an inevitable part of life. Her award-winning 2014 novel Station Eleven, set in a world in which 99 percent of humanity has perished, debuted as a television series just as America was nearing the end of a second full year coexisting with COVID. Mandels The Glass Hotel, which centers on a Ponzi scheme, had an unfortunate release date of March 24, 2020. Rather than traveling to promote it, she spent much of lockdown writing her latest novel, Sea of Tranquility (out April 5). The expansive book features a time-shifting plot that explores pandemics, moon colonization, time travel, and, perhaps most brilliantly, the idea that the basic rhythms of daily life carry us along even as our circumstances shift into unrecognizable forms. While Mandel focuses on many of the things that terrify us, she also illustrates how hope and humanity are flames that can never be fully extinguished. Recently, she sat down with Jia Tolentino, author of the acclaimed essay collection Trick Mirror, for a wide-ranging conversation on isolation, the future, and finding beauty in the mundane.Adrienne Gaffney

Jia Tolentino: Sea of Tranquility is the name of a waterless plain on the moons surface, which, in your novel, has been colonized in a remarkably humane way. The moon colonies have rivers, scheduled rainfalls. There are defects, accidents, but there is no sense that there is a sort of Bezos-masterminded inequality-magnifier extractive plunder operation.

Emily St. John Mandel: Its not perfect, as you say. But its a little bit utopian. The state of being on the moon itself is a somewhat utopian vision, the kind of antiStation Eleven. Civilization didnt collapse into nothingnesswe made it to the moon.

JT: And in this book, even further.

EM: I wrote Sea of Tranquility during lockdown in 2020, whichyou know what it was like. The constant sirens, that sense of death all around. For me, it was the feeling of being stuck in my apartment, wondering if I would see my family again, after years in which I traveled constantly without a second thought, barely noticing when I was on a plane. I found myself just imagining this beautiful place that was really, really far from my apartment. That was a way to leave the neighborhoodto imagine myself on the moon. And youre right, I hadnt thought of it in terms of the corporate-dystopian nightmare it probably would be in real life. Colony Two by Amazon. Who else has the money to do that? But I needed to think through, How good could it be? I was thinking in terms of creating a beautiful space and trying to imagine a peaceful [place] that is as far away as humanly possible. There are a lot of dystopic science fiction stories where theres some insanely oppressive government doing X terrible thing. It was just nice to imagine a space that was fairly Earth-like in the sense of being not particularly heaven or particularly hell. Its a place, its got problems; its mostly fine most of the time, but not always.

JT: Its a little funny that were talking about it as utopianyou dont go into great detail in the book, but its assumed that cataclysmic climate events on Earth have spurred this moon colonization. Huge portions of the world are uninhabitable.

EM: Yes, in my hypothetical year 2203, its not that all is lostits that there are lots of new countries, and parts of the world cant be lived in anymore. And What am I doing for dinner? and I really miss my familythese human things that I think would remain.

Marco GIannavola

JT: Its especially visible in the HBO Max adaptation of Station Eleven, the way youve rendered stately and humane some of the exact scenarios that keep us up at 4 a.m. when we roll over and look at a new climate report on our phones. You foreground a standpoint that is optimistic in that it is concerned with the beauty of mundane human existence. Are you writing yourself toward that standpoint to reinforce it, or is it native to the way you see the world?

EM: Its fairly native to the way I see the world. Partly because, when I first started out as a writer, I was very conscious that character development was a weak spot for me, so I developed an obsessive interest in the way people respond and the things they notice. And its hard to say something like this without sounding really pretentious, but I do find myself caught up in and in love with the details of the world. It probably comes through clearest in that one chapter in Station Eleven that I probably have memorized, which is just a list of things [that no longer exist]No more diving into pools of chlorinated water lit green from below. No more ball games played out under floodlights. In writing about the moon colony, I was still just thinking about what people value, and the larger question of what comprises a life. Its these details, and you put them together, and thats your day, your month, your year, your lifetime.

JT: You mentioned in another interview that you had wanted to write about technology with Station Eleven, and you ended up doing that through writing about its absence. Was there any equivalent subjectsomething you wrote about through absencewith Sea of Tranquility?

EM: In Station Eleven I found myself thinking about how incredibly small your world would become in the absence of the internet or other telecommunication systems. Your whole field of knowledge would be about a hundred square miles around you. You would belong to a very specific place. That would be lost in a world like that of Sea of Tranquility, where you could live anywhere, including the Andromeda galaxy. Especially if you carry that forward to time travel. Can life be meaningful without constraints?

JT: There is in fact something beautiful about being bounded, trapped with your family. In imagining its opposite, you have the beauty of confinement come through.

EM: During the early months of the pandemic in particular, I was so aware of trying to create a little, magical, self-contained world inside my apartment for my daughter, whos almost six. I think thats a project most parents were engaged in. That was very real.

Can life be meaningful without constraints?

JT: This novel includes something like autofictiona narrative that exists in the section about [the character] Olive Llewellyn, an author who wrote a best-selling pandemic novel called Marienbad. Olive is on an endless book tour, with all its attendant depersonalizations, the self-aggrandizement that comes from speaking onstage, and also the minor degradations. In one scene, a business traveler traps Olive in a monologue about his career, then asks her what she does for a living, and when she says she writes books, he reflexively asks: For children?

EM: That was a guy in the airport in Amsterdam.

JT: I felt sure that that was a guy somewhere. It must have been tonally difficult to write about all that.

EM: Absolutely. I wasnt sure what it was at firstmaybe a personal essay I would never publish, maybe fiction. Ive just had the sense for some time that Ive been leading a very strange life, even as I have incredible gratitude for it. Still, there are regularly these little sexist moments. What happens to me at almost every onstage event is that an interviewer will ask me what message people should take away from Station Eleven. Ill explain that I did not write it with a message in mind, and theyll say, Are you sure?

And Im like, Yes, I am actually sure. I am the expert on this particular book.

Marco GIannavola

JT: Theres one sentence in particular: In Shanghai, Olive spent a combined total of three hours talking about herself and her book, which meant talking about the end of the world while trying not to imagine the world ending with her daughter in it. I was thinkingyou wrote Station Eleven before youd had a baby, but went on a book tour after?

EM: I found out I was pregnant at the Auckland Writers Festival, told my husband over FaceTime, and kept touring until I was seven months pregnant. And to be honestand Im not proud of thisI dont think I could have written Station Eleven after having a child, because of exactly that: Imagining the end of the world means imagining the death of everyone you love.

JT: Theres this attraction in your work to transitory spaces, like airport terminals and hotel lobbies. You seem to have an interest in the kind of human presence that is revealed in these places where people are passing through. I share this attraction in terms of watching and noticing. What is it about these spaces?

EM: Theres something in that that fascinates me just in terms of the possibility of interacting with people. Maybe having a nice moment, or just seeing them, or maybe its even less than that, and then never crossing paths again. Its not like your neighborhood coffee shop, where youre going to run into people. You walk by the guy from Des Moines and thats it, the only interaction.

JT: Theres something about the way these spaces are positioned within the narratives of your last three novels, in particular, that also just suggests an essential fact of transience about our lives. Its another way of suggesting a level of scale that renders us individually and not unpleasantly insignificant. Its like were in many senses just passing through. We pass through an airport terminal as lightly as we, from at least a planetary scale, pass through the world.

EM: One of my favorite Tom Waits songs has the lyric The world is not my home, Im just a passin thru. Theres something of that in the experience of all these characters. I dont know if that just comes from me thinking about fictional characters that pass through the length of a book, or if it is just a broader interest in mortality and what it means to only be on this planet for, like, a flash of light and were gone and the world moves on without us. That sounds so morbid and depressive, which Im not, but it is what I think about.

JT: I dont think its morbid at all. I think its like the writer John McPhees metaphor that you could take the entire existence of the Earth and itd be the length of someones arm, and you could snip off the fingernail and you would cut off the entirety of human existence. I find that really freeing.

EM: Absolutely. This whole thing is so small.

JT: In this novel, a sense of mystical chance and unity is rooted in the possibility that were straight-up living in a simulation.

EM: Its possible that the experience of writing a novel has seeped into the contents of the novel. Theres something about the way novels have a sense of limitless possibility for me when I start writing themI feel its starting to creep into the structure, where there are these shadow novels under the novel. The only way to really make time travel work for me, and maybe this is a cognitive limitation on my part, was to imagine that were in a simulation. I dont know whether to keep thinking about these endless possibilities of narrative, and to keep expressing them in the weirdness thats crept into my work nowthe element about the nature of reality and the possibility of multiple universes and the shadow lives we didnt liveor to just pull it together and go back to something more straightforward.

JT: Straightforward? Oh, I vote for the weirdness.

This article appears in the April 2022 issue of ELLE.

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Emily St. John Mandel and Jia Tolentino Look at the Future - ELLE

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Ways Marvel Lied To You About Moon Knight – Looper

Posted: at 3:15 pm

Nearly every aspect of Moon Knight's character fluctuates often and dramatically, so it's no surprise that the style and scale of his adventures fluctuate too. At his core, Moon Knight is a street-level hero, prowling the streets of New York City by night, battling crooks with martial arts and simple melee weapons. Even in the majority of his team-ups, Moon Knight remains grounded in smaller stakes (pun intended, given all the vampires he fights), mainly allying with fellow street-level heroes like Spider-Man, Punisher, Luke Cage, and the Black Cat.

But Moon Knight has another side. When he's more directly in Khonshu's control, or fighting alongside one of the Avengers teams, he enters a far different world many of them, in fact. He was one of the heroes to take part in the intergalactic events of 1992's "Infinity War" and 2018's "Infinity Wars." He has time-traveled on multiple occasions, like his trip to the ancient homeland of Conan the Barbarian in 2019's "Serpent War." During "Age of Khonshu," he even gained the powers of the Iron Fist, Doctor Strange, Ghost Rider, Thor, and the Phoenix Force, all in an effort to fight Marvel's literal Devil, Mephisto. The shift in setting and tone between Moon Knight stories can be intense, but can also lead to some top-tier moments.

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In a world of lies, Sulphur Springs poet Negasi sifts for the truth – Creative Loafing Tampa

Posted: at 3:15 pm

click to enlarge

c/o Negasi

An African mask owned by Tampa poet Negasi.

This collaborative event, sponsored by the University of South Floridas African-African American Burial Grounds Project, Kitchen Table Literary Arts, Sulphur Springs Heritage Museum and The Battleground youth program, was held during Black History Month in the Sulphur Springs neighborhood as an effort to help remember the injustice of erasure as we move forward.

Memory is tricky at times. I frequently forget who I am, who I truly am at the core. I forget that at my core, I am indestructible, boundless, worthy of deep respect. Often, I also forget that this same core exists in other people, even if on the surface they dont seem to possess it.

Like tree roots that are entwined and connected through the same source beneath the soil, we are connected through a network that we cant always see directly but experience evidence of its existence. And on the surface level, we can see the ways in which we grow, what we have endured, what we may offer to others.

The collective and specific experiences of a culture and peoples are expressions of this universal principle. It is not by diminishing or eradicating specificity where we find the dignity of all lifeit is by delving into it. Some have the misconception that acknowledging the realities of race and gender causes more division. It is quite the opposite. Because to deny the specific lived experiences of people, especially those experiences that shine a light on oppression and the mechanisms that support it, is to deny their humanity, their dignity.

We often forget as a collective. We forget the patterns that continue to repeat over time, proven over and over again. Just as the universal principle that binds us all can express tremendous value and good, there is also an inherent and incessant flip side to this, manifested as ignorance. This is why the act of remembering is so vital.

As we stood together at the event, including everyone who was seated, young and old, Black and white, academic and blue-collar, I called attention to how this moment encompasses past, present and future. And how we are acting against the cycles of oppression by writing our own stories and making sure we are heard. I thought about the insidious nature of gentrification and how under the guise of bettering a community, it actually operates to bulldoze a culture and the people who have created that culture, similar to colonization.

A couple of the boys who Ive supported ever since I started working in Sulphur Springs are moving out of the neighborhood. Their family was forced out due to drastically rising rent prices.

As I dropped them off at their Sulphur Spring home after they attended the We Will Not Be Erased event, I asked them how they feel about having to move. They said terrible. They grew up there, they grew up in that house. I told them that to me, they are Sulphur Springs. It wont be the same without them. They will take with them their brilliance, their creativity, their keen perception, their generous hearts, their sense of humor.

The Hispanic-looking man who had approached as I set-up for the We Will Not be Erased event told me that he had recently bought some property in the area. Not a home, property. Not a community member, but an owner. It was clear from the antagonistic response he paid to me when I told him about the event that he had accidentally stumbled upon, that he wasnt entering the neighborhood with an understanding of and respect for the people who already lived there. My answer to him? Black.

Of course, Black people are not the only ones who have been erased, whether through building upon their bodies or stealing their culture. We know that our Indigenous brothers and sisters have experienced incalculable loss at the hands of invaders as well as all the injustices experienced by other cultures that have been colonized by white people, whether British, French, Dutch or Spanish.

If we are to change the patterns of oppression that have continued, we will have to maintain constant vigilance and call out whenever we see the same pattern starting to emerge. Real estate developers and buyers who have no regard for the culture or the people of a neighborhood, especially when the culture and people are those who have historically become colonized and oppressed, better think otherwise. Stay your asses out.

I dont carry guns, but I do educate youth. And in a greater sense, I think thats the most powerful weapon. For this installment of Poets Notebook, I would like to amplify the voice of my very first poetry student from The Battleground, a bright young man who lives in Sulphur Springs who goes by Negasi.

In a world of lies, I sift for the truth.

So l dig myself out the dirt then go to the river and float down to where the Metal towers parlay and pursuit. Poisoning the hands that feed them.

Building luxury decked out in blood and bones. A civilization erased, but the bones and spirit never leaves its place... the blood erodes the infrastructure.

If the dead cannot rest neither can the living. The end is to come but so what. Find your heart space be in where you choose to end up by your judgment.

Civilizations Rise and Fall but the ones who survive are the ones who listen to the hearts. The unseen voices of your connection to the bones of course.

We are Not doing this for no reason. As long as youre going towards your true goals you change the world and you change the most important thingyourself.

Allow the bones to work its ways. Then prepare to work towards the true future you seek as one tree falls a seed is left in its place. We are in a time now where the bones won't be forced down as foundation anymore.

The bones at night has the blue screaming red as white fades away. Bones of every unheard voice quakes the times ticks closer the bones grow stronger and a new tree is grown in place.

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Terraformers Colony Builder Attempts the Impossible Task of Creating a Realistic Colony on Mars – Gamers Decide

Posted: at 3:14 pm

Humans have been asking themselves about the viability of settling on Mars for years. Currently, the logistics of such an undertaking make the idea completely impractical and unrealistic. However, what if we get to Mars? How would one go about setting up a successful colony?

In Terraformers players are faced with the daunting prospect of settling on Mars, and building a safe, self-sustainable colony on the Red Planet that can grow into humanitys second home.

Players find themselves on the Red Planet, building humanitys first-ever colony away from Earth. The first colony must focus on providing inhabitants with what they need to survive and serving as a staging ground for the development of more colonies.

Players can send explorers across Mars to look for mineral-rich areas, and suitable volcanic tubes and craters to build new colonies in. The rare metals and minerals of Mars can be mined to be used in the development of highly advanced new technologies.

Different leaders have different perks and abilities. Image by 'Terraformers.'

Players can use terraforming techniques such as activating volcanoes, crashing asteroids, or space mirrors to shape the planet to meet their needs and help to build a hospitable second home for humanity.

Resource management, and the development of transit systems between cities, as well as all the relevant infrastructure to support human life on Mars, are all in the players hands.

Players have the option to spread flora and fauna, plant forests, spread bacteria, and introduce adaptive animal species to the planet to build up its biodiversity.

According to the developers of Terraformers, they are building this game to inspire interplanetary colonization and think of realistic methods of doing so.

Terraformers is developed by Asteroid Lab, and is coming to Steam on the 21st of April, 2021.

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Cole Sprouse on Finding a Healthy Balance in Hollywood – The New York Times

Posted: at 3:14 pm

I hope you dont mind, Im going to be scarfing down this chicken wrap at the same time we talk, Cole Sprouse politely informs me as he sits in the kitchen wearing a fuzzy, baby blue sweater. The wrap in question is already halfway to his mouth.

Sprouse is used to multitasking.

He and his twin brother, Dylan, began their professional acting careers when they were infants and worked steadily throughout their childhoods, sharing prominent roles on Grace Under Fire and in the Adam Sandler film Big Daddy. Cole went on to play Rosss son on Friends before reteaming with Dylan in the Disney Channel sitcom The Suite Life of Zack and Cody (Cole played the brainy Cody). The tween hit led to a spinoff series, TV movie and mega kid stardom for the twins. By age 18, theyd effectively burned out.

But after graduating from New York University with a degree in archaeology, Cole Sprouse fulfilled a promise hed made to his manager to give one more round of TV auditions a go before quitting the industry for good. He booked the role of the brooding outcast Jughead Jones on the CW drama Riverdale and was sucked in again.

I started acting when I was so young that I hadnt actually attempted, as an adult, to think about if I really enjoyed performance, Sprouse said in a recent video call from Vancouver, British Columbia, where hes currently filming the seventh season of Riverdale. He continued, When I returned, I reminded myself that I do very much love the art of acting. But I still have a very complicated relationship to celebrity culture.

Hes learned to guard his private life. Rare public comments about his relationships past (namely, with his Riverdale co-star Lili Reinhart) and present (the model Ari Fournier) are scrutinized by fans and widely recounted by entertainment outlets. He started a secondary Instagram account devoted solely to sharing the photos he takes of strangers while theyre trying to sneakily snap photos of him. It was an attempt to go, Hey, I actually have agency in the situation, too, he explained. It helped me a lot.

His latest role is the lead in the HBO Max rom-com Moonshot not to be confused with the unrelated 2022 releases Moon Knight and Moonfall. In the near future, where robots run coffee shops and Mars is being colonized, Sprouse plays Walt, a hapless college student who hitches a ride on a Mars-bound rocket alongside Sophie (Lana Condor) in an attempt to reach another girl on Mars he thinks could be the One.

Intermittently puffing on a vape pen after finishing the chicken wrap, Sprouse spoke about billionaires, the effects of childhood fame and turning 30.

These are edited excerpts from our conversation.

Moonshot is a futuristic take on a conventional romantic comedy. Are you a romcom fan?

I have my favorites, and theyre all over the map. Im a huge Forgetting Sarah Marshall fan, for example. And though theres a heavy romantic element throughout it, most people would just call that a comedy and yet, by all genre boundaries, it is a rom-com.

I think for so long romantic comedies were put down as chick flicks, something lowbrow that only a female audience would care about. Male-centric entries like Forgetting Sarah Marshall made some people rethink that notion.

The general trend with the arts always starts with a large female fan base really falling in love with something. In a lot of cases, we see the female audience braving the territory first, and then everyone follows. Ultimately, with Moonshot, we set out to make a movie that didnt really take itself super seriously, that we had a lot of lighthearted fun on, and we were able to weave an old married couple dynamic into Lana and Is relationship.

The film also throws some solid punches at the billionaire space race: Zach Braffs Elon Musk-esque character admits he could have used his fortune to solve world hunger dozens of times over, but went to Mars instead. How do you feel about the current space cowboy endeavors of people like Musk and Jeff Bezos?

Oh, I think its tremendously masturbatory. Its a ridiculous thing. When I was studying archaeology, we used to have this conversation about the resurrection of the mammoth. The conversation would always devolve into two camps: the camp that really wanted to see the mammoth walk the earth again. And the camp that was going, Hey, we have active species that are currently going extinct. If we put the resources you are talking about putting into the already extinct mammoth and shift that focus to the present, we could do way more good. I feel like this conversation about space cowboys is very similar. Im in the camp where I go, lets focus on the present. We have an active space that we are living in that is currently decaying. We need to shift focus and resources to here.

So, no chance youre booking a commercial ticket on a rocket any time soon.

No, Im already such a paranoid freak when it comes to flying. I couldnt imagine what my control-freak nature would do when we started taking off. I would be a nervous wreck.

People like to talk about former child stars in this dichotomy of either they spiral out of control or, somehow, come out OK. Do you think its possible for anyone to actually come through that experience unscathed?

My brother and I used to get quite a bit of, Oh, you made it out! Oh, youre unscathed! No. The young women on the channel we were on [Disney Channel] were so heavily sexualized from such an earlier age than my brother and I that theres absolutely no way that we could compare our experiences. And every single person going through that trauma has a unique experience. When we talk about child stars going nuts, what were not actually talking about is how fame is a trauma. So Im violently defensive against people who mock some of the young women who were on the channel when I was younger because I dont feel like it adequately comprehends the humanity of that experience and what it takes to recover. And, to be quite honest, as I have now gone through a second big round of this fame game as an adult, Ive noticed the same psychological effects that fame yields upon a group of young adults as I did when I was a child. I just think people have an easier time hiding it when theyre older.

After it was announced that Riverdale had been renewed for a seventh season, a lot of memes popped up imagining your reaction when you heard the news. The general internet consensus seemed to be that you were completely distraught to have to do another season. Is that accurate?

[Laughs] Its not completely accurate. One, because Ive just assumed were going to see the finality of our [seven-season] contracts. Two, I think the internet assumes because of how insane our show is that were probably doing a bit worse than we actually are. Its easy to forget that people love the show. And I do think its going to be much more appreciated in 10 years than it is right now. It would be pretty pompous of me to say that another season of financial stability is not something that would be appealing. Though Im not going to lie. The memes do make me laugh.

Youve built a side career as a professional photographer, mainly in fashion. What is it about that medium that made you want to pursue it?

When I was in school, I was traveling a lot for archaeology, so I always had my camera and I was taking almost anthropological-type photos of the people I was meeting, the culture I was surrounded by. And then, just by being in New York City, I got wrapped up in fashion work and built a portfolio. That was my main source of revenue until Riverdale Season 2.

Youre turning 30 in August. Does this decade feel like the start of a new chapter?

Definitely. I feel like my ducks are in a row better than theyve ever been. Were also seeing the conclusion of a program Ive spent the majority of my 20s on, so there is this world of possibilities that lies before me at the end of this production that I find incredibly appealing and intoxicating. And, I hate to break it to everybody, but Im not the only 30 year old playing a teen on television.

You made it to college in Moonshot. Youre starting to age up.

Just stringing them along, slowly but surely. In an ideal world, when Riverdale finishes, I would love to be doing one to two movies a year and photography the rest of the time. And the logical intersection of those two worlds will eventually be directing.

Were living in a time of extreme nostalgia for the 90s and 2000s. Is there any chance youd go full circle and do a Suite Life reboot?

I dont think Ill ever return to that. Not that I have a problem with other people doing the reboots thing. Im just a big believer that if something is beautiful in the past, you should let it stay beautiful. To bring it into the future feels a bit like reheating a really good, fresh meal in the microwave. It would be hard to be in my 30s and go [in a deep growl], Zack and Cody are back, man!

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Moving to Mars might be a bad idea – Sarnia and Lambton County This Week

Posted: at 3:14 pm

Breadcrumb Trail Links

Twenty-one years ago, on April 7, 2001, America launched a spacecraft into the cosmos.

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Its mission was to go out and seek new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no spacecraft had gone before.

No wait, my bad, that was the USS Enterprise I was thinking of, which isnt scheduled to be launched until 2245.

The mission of the spacecraft that was launched in 2001 the Mars Odyssey was far less dramatic, but nonetheless significant: to investigate the Red Planets environment, to provide key information on its surface and to map the chemical and mineralogical makeup of Mars as a step to detecting evidence of past or present water and volcanic activity (NASA).

But deep, deep down, we all know the real reason why the Yanks launched the Mars Odyssey 21 years ago to scope out potential new real estate on the solar systems fourth planet.

Colonizing Mars has been a dream of sorts for humanity for centuries, almost a fetish if I may be so bold to say. It has inspired countless books and movies, including The Martian, Arthur C. Clarkes The Sands of Mars, Mission to Mars, Total Recall (that film where Arnold Schwarzenegger travels to Mars and unsurprisingly kills pretty much everyone there), even the sensational so-bad-that-its-actually-good 1965 classic, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, where ol Saint Nick is abducted by a buncha ungrateful, Yuletide-averse Mars dwellers.

Were so obsessed with Mars that weve even named one of our most delicious chocolate bars after the planet good luck trying finding a Neptune bar, a Uranus bar or a Mercury bar in your local corner store, we dont care much about those planets (we named a car after Saturn and after a relatively unsuccessful run, production was finally halted in 2009).

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Noted contemporary deep thinkers Elon Musk and Donald Trump have openly mused about sending humans to the Red Planet and I feel that it would be a truly tremendous day for humanity if we could somehow trick them both into boarding a spaceship (along with the equally cerebral, murderous, unhinged space cadet Vlad Putin), lock the door behind them then send them on an impromptu scouting mission to Mars, which is nearly 500 million kilometres away. Its not likely to happen, admittedly, but a simple man like me can dream his dreams, cant he?

In any event, Mars is an attractive place to colonize because: a) it is, relatively speaking, not so far away from us (a one-way trip to Mars takes about six to seven months, apparently, which is do-able provided that no one on board the spaceship forgets their wallet at home and has to turn the spaceship around); b) it contains things like carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, water ice and permafrost, stuff that is pretty essential to maintaining life; c) its got a great view of Earth, in real estate parlance; and d) it is big and red and named after the Roman god of war, which is pretty hunky-dory if I do say so myself.

While leaving all our problems behind here on Earth probably seems like a wise idea for the continuation of our species what with climate change, wars, overpopulation, pandemics and our ceaseless degradation of the environment high tailing it to Mars might not be the easy win we think it would be, for a myriad of reasons.

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For one thing, shipping off humans to Mars is going to cost us, in the words of the aforementioned Trump, a huuuuge amount of money.

Colonizing Mars would cost us not millions, not billions, not even trillions of dollars wed probably start talking about quadrillions, thats how expensive its going to get. The fuel costs alone to ship people to the Red Planet would be outrageous (gas was $1.75/litre this week for instance, which means filling up for a single Mars trip would cost us hundreds of millions of dollars. Counterpoint: wed probably earn a lot of Air Miles points).

Also, were starting with nothing on Mars, so wed have to create from scratch the infrastructure of our future domed cities with their moving sidewalks, robot charging stations and automated Starbucks outlets. Wouldnt it be better to invest that money into cleaning up the Earth and making it more inhabitable? Of course it would be, but human nature is stupid and were drawn to this Mars thing like moths to a flame.

Secondly, Mars isnt Earth, so wed probably have to worry about a whole host of other life-threatening occurrences whilst inhabiting the planet, things like starving to death (Mars might not have the most fertile of soil, but apparently dandelions can grow there; unfortunately, after a few years of an all-dandelion diet you probably wouldnt want to keep on living), dying from lethal doses of radiation, running out of oxygen, getting swept up in one of Mars frequently occurring dust storms or freezing to death.

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Not to mention the real possibility that robots will begin outsmarting humans and attempt to terminate us (just like in 2001: A Space Odyssey) after we inhabit Mars because theyll quickly realize that were as dumb and gullible as a bucket of bolts.

Finally, if we look at our past behaviour, why in the world would we want to export all the awfulness weve created here on Earth to a new planet? I can guarantee you that if humanity travels to Mars and somehow we discover some sacred form of life, well immediately bulldoze it and build a strip mall on top of it.

Humans will inevitably start polluting Mars, doing things like leaving our candy wrappers on the ground and not recycling, and in a few hundred years well have to find a new planet to colonize because we absolutely wrecked another celestial body (hello Kepler 442-b!).

So for all the above reasons, at least until we collectively get our stuff together as a species, I truly believe we should forget about moving to Mars and focus on some good old self-loving for Earth.

If humanitys space cadets want to wreck a place, send them to the Moon its just a hunk of rock and metal (filled with green cheese and old golf balls from past human visits) that has almost no atmosphere and little gravity, so let them have their fun up there. Leave Mars for the Martians, I say, and save them the headache of having to clean up after us humans.

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Scientists measure speed of sound on Mars with NASAs Perseverance Rover – Daily Star

Posted: at 3:14 pm

Mars is often seen as Earths sister planet, and scientists have long dreamed of one day establishing a colony there.

But even having a chat on the Red Planet would be tricky, and listening to music would be well-nigh impossible, as new data from NASAs Perseverance rover demonstrates.

In a study published this week in the scientific journal Nature, scientists said they had worked out that the speed of sound is slower and less consistent on Mars, while even quite loud sounds wouldnt carry half as far.

On Earth, sound typically travels at 767 miles per hour. But in the thin carbon dioxide atmosphere of Mars, high-pitched sounds would only move at about 559mph while baser tones would wader along at a sedate 537mph.

"On Earth, the sounds from an orchestra reach you at the same speed, whether they are low or high, explained Sylvestre Maurice, the studys lead author, but imagine on Mars, if you are a little far from the stage, there will be a big delay.

The sound wouldnt carry as far either, so youd need to sit much closer to the stage. While in the Earths atmosphere a sound might easily carry for a couple of hundred feet the same sound on Mars would suffer a significant drop in volume after just 13ft.

High-pitched sounds such as childrens voices and birdsong, would be particularly affected.

As NASA explains: "Because the Mars atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide (Earths atmosphere is mostly nitrogen and oxygen), higher-frequency noises will likely be more attenuated than bass pitches, meaning we probably wont hear them as well as lower-pitched sounds.

Recordings from Perseverances two microphones one mounted high on the rovers mast and the other built into its mobile camera demonstrate the eerie quietness of Earths chilly neighbour.

NASA has put together a series of recordings and posted them online to give a sense of just how much the Martian atmosphere would change the way we hear familiar sounds.

It is stunning all the science we can get with an instrument as simple as a microphone on Mars, says Baptiste Chide, a postdoctoral researcher in planetary science at NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a contributor to the SuperCam microphone.

Recording audible sounds on Mars is a unique experience, he adds. With the microphones onboard Perseverance, we will add a fifth sense to Mars exploration. It will open a new area of science investigation for both the atmosphere and the surface.

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Why You Need to Watch This Sci-Fi Masterpiece on Prime Video – CNET

Posted: at 3:14 pm

Bobbie Draper, for my money the coolest character in The Expanse.

I am about to start gushing about The Expanse, telling you all the reasons you absolutely should watch it. But before I do that, here's a laundry list of things that are decidedly not good about The Expanse.

Whenever I go full hog trying to convince someone to watch The Expanse, I like to get this list out of the way. I want people to know from the outset: This TV show is not perfect. In fact, depending on what you value in your television, you could even call The Expanse "bad."

I do not think The Expanse is bad.

On the contrary, I think The Expanse is very good. Often it's good in spite of its flaws. Sometimes it's enhanced by those flaws.

Set hundreds of years in the future when humans are spread out across the solar system, The Expanse is based on a series of hard sci-fi novels written by Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck under the pen name James S.A. Corey. It is dense with peerless universe building. It's a show about the very real perils of space travel and colonization, but also a surprisingly nuanced show that deals in interplanetary politics and class warfare.

In one corner we have Earth and all its citizens. In the other, Mars. The humans who have colonized Mars are a military-focused, tough group of people prone to resolving conflict with force. Those still on Earth are the preening, politically savvy elite.

The wild cards are the Belters, residents of outer planets and asteroid belts who have developed their own Creole-esque language and, alongside that, a culture completely separate from the humans on Earth and Mars. Sick of being trampled upon by the "Earthers," the Belters are threatening revolution, but lack the power or resources to truly strike back at their oppressors.

Everything that occurs in The Expanse stems from the tensions between these three discrete groups.

The tight knit crew of the Rocinante.

The magic of The Expanse is how effortlessly the show flits between genres. It's hard sci-fi at all times, but in its first couple of seasons, The Expanse plays out like a murder mystery. Later, it's a show about alien technology and the arms race associated with that. Then it becomes a show about exploring strange new planets. Ultimately, The Expanse is a show about all these things, but places its uniquely crafted universe at its core, giving it a through line lesser sci-fi shows don't have.

The show's aesthetic plays a similar trick. Not everyone enjoys its metallic, video-game-esque color scheme, but I like video games, so I'm a fan. The Expanse feels like how I think a Mass Effect show could feel, if that ever comes to fruition and is somehow decent. The Expanse is cool, clinical and smart -- and sometimes the wooden performances amplify that in ways that should be bad, but often feels good? In a universe that lacks warmth, dialed back, minimalist performances make sense.

Yeah, I'm confused too. But it works.

It's a very not good hat.

Ultimately, The Expanse is a show that will never disappoint you. Much like Dark -- for my money the best show on Netflix-- The Expanse is now fully complete and, unlike most sci-fi shows, defied the odds and finished well. Some of its six seasons are better than others, but The Expanse is incredibly consistent. You'll be shocked by how much ground it covers and how seamlessly it moves from one civilization-altering crisis to the next.

It's funny, but almost everyone I know who watches The Expanse, including myself, loves to complain about it. They'll complain about the clunky dialogue and the strange performances, but there's nothing else like it. It's a show that's stubbornly carried by its strengths, to levels of quality it has no right attaining. You owe it to yourself to watch, if only to create your own list of things in The Expanse that annoy you.

Just make sure that list includes Thomas Jane's hat. Unforgivable.

Explore movies, games, superheroes and more with CNET Culture. Delivered Tuesdays and Fridays.

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‘Did we avert climate disaster? And did Mayo ever win the All-Ireland?’ – Independent.ie

Posted: at 3:14 pm

Did humanity come together to take the steps needed to protect the planet or are ye now building spaceships to join the Elon Musk-founded colony on Mars?

While humans are specialists in dragging their feet, the Covid-19 pandemic and war in Ukraine showed that, as a species, we can move heaven and earth to accomplish something when we really want to.

I hope none of ye have to experience sunset on Mars.

And I also hope Limerick still have a stranglehold on Liam MacCarthy.

Today the worlds carbon dioxide concentration is 418ppm and rising yearly despite all we know about the impacts of CO2 on global warmingand of climate on our survival.

We have destroyed vast ecosystems and devastated animal populations despite all we know about nature and the life support system it affords us.

We have the science and technologies to fix this but are mired in our own ignorance, greed and cowardice.

The kind of world you inhabit depends on how we change our mindsets and habits now.

I hope we do right by you.

Dear future friends of 2122.

I must be dead at least 50 years now, so Im running low on news.

Its March 2022, and our family is in the throes of battling Covid-19. We are isolating in our home. Its boring.

Vaccines saved millions of lives worldwide.

I hope your generation never experiences anything like this.

Pandemic aside, its a scary time in the world right now.

A Russian autocratic regime is, as I write, bombarding the sovereign democratic country of Ukraine.

The threat of climate change looms large over humanity, and I hope we passed on a better world to you.

Maybe you could answer some questions for me.

Did I ever write that screenplay? Did I have a second baby? Did I ever buy a cottage by the sea?

Did Mayo ever again win the All-Ireland?

In my time capsule I would put in my hopes for a female Taoiseach and outline the biggest challenges facing the country at the moment housing, a possible recession and recovery out of a global pandemic, to give future generations an idea as to what life is like today.

On a pessimistic note, I feel like the country will probably still be dealing with similar challenges, as housing is an issue now that was also a problem a century ago.

Ill also write about the joy of meeting people in real life and not through online introductions. Dating apps and making friends through Instagram seems to be all the rage nowadays but I love nothing more than just bumping into somebody in a pub and making a friend.

If you are able to read this 100 years from now, it hopefully means we have done something substantial to curb the effects of the impending climate catastrophe and the water and food shortages that will inevitably follow from it.

If, as I fear you might be, you are reading this in some kind of post-apocalyptic hellscape, I can only apologise. In that case, I hope the paper this is printed on can serve some actual use as part of an improvised meal or kindling for a fire. At the very least, maybe you can make a hat.

Hello, is anyone out there? Im hoping a human is reading this and not some alien species that has since colonised Earth after we did our best over the past century to destroy the planet through pollution, climate change, war, greed and hatred.

Sorry if I sound pessimistic but even as a child growing up in the Atomic Age,I played in my neighbours backyard bomb shelter and I really hope the threat of nuclear annihilation thathas been in the background for my entire life never came to pass.

I also hope that people realised that saving the planet was more important than showing off in their SUVs or doing other stupid things to keep up with the Joneses at the expense of humanity. If you are a human reading this, then well done. If not, we only have (had) ourselves to blame.

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If Space Settlements Explained How to Live in Space, Space Forces Explains the Why – ArchDaily

Posted: at 3:14 pm

If Space Settlements Explained How to Live in Space, Space Forces Explains the Why

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As the world spins deeper into the third year of a global pandemic with no sign of abating, a newspacerace is forming over our heads. Entry is open to all, and the tickets are literal. The Architect's Newspaper's Jonathan Hilburg explores how the world's richest men are charting new paths for the human species, andhow the public are reacting tothe future of private space tourism.

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Just pay Richard Bransons Virgin Galactic $250,000 and you, like the more than 600 customers the company has already lined up, can touch the edge of space. If you wanted to up the ante and paid $28 million to Jeff Bezoss Blue Origin, you could have dined with and sat next to the Amazon founder himself when the first manned flight of the companys New Shepard rocket launched on July 20, 2021. And if youre so wealthy you just want to show off, you can pay $55 million for a ticket to the International Space Station courtesy of Elon Musks SpaceX, whose Falcon 9 rocket successfully deployed the first private trip to orbit in September.

To these would-be space cowboys, NASA had its chance and failed; only great men can drag the planet up and onward. The only problem is the public isnt biting. As Vox pointed out, a majority of Americans polled by Pew Research are disillusioned with private space tourism and would rather see the extravagant amounts of money being thrown around by billionaires used to solve terrestrial problems. The sentiment isnt new: Public support for the Apollo missions was divided throughout the 1960s, when rampant income and racial inequality presented much more pressing targets for federal funding.

For their part, Bezos, Branson, and Musk see themselves as charting new paths for the human species, though they differ on the details. They are the self-appointed helmsmen pointing the rest of us into an impossibly bright future where profit charts only go up and to the right. Why resist?

Smug as they are, todays billionaires are only picking up where mystics, rocket scientists, and socialists left off. As Fred Scharmen documents in Space Forces: A Critical History of Life in Outer Space, many have sought salvation among the stars. The book catalogs these 19th, 20th, and 21st-century visionaries, drawing a line from Nikolai Fedorov, the 19th-century Russian originator of the Cosmism movement, to Bezos, a proponent of interplanetary expansion to save humanity. Not directly, of course. By touching on the development of contrasting views of how practical spaceflight was developed across seven distinct time periods, Scharmen lays the threads of how we got here out in perfect clarityhistory, like music, layers sample, remixes, and references. He returns to the well first visited in his 2019 book Space Settlements, but rather than discuss the logistical challenges of building habitats in space and inventing a ground plane with no frame of reference, the topic at hand is the dueling visions of the future we now seem locked into.

Fedorov believed that if death was the ultimate evil to avoid, the highest good would be to solve it, with the end goal of resurrecting everyone who had ever died; the only way to sustain this exponential growth was unending expansion by whatever means necessary. Failure to do so would (Should space-faring humans encounter another sentient species, it would be better to stamp them out at the first available opportunity.) Federov died in 1903, but his ideas resonated with utopian revolutionaries such as Alexander Bogdanov, whose 1908 novelRed Stardepicts a socialistMarswhere the inhabitants are freed from societal divisions by a lack of plate tectonics and labor is not compelled but willingly offered. But after exhausting the resources of their home planet, and an unsuccessful expedition to Venus, the Martians eye Earth as a potential substitute. All that stands in the way of their cosmic destiny is human society, which, being less evolved and mired in strife, can be eliminated without a second thoughtto do any less would doom them.

The solar system can easily support a trillion humans, Bezos has repeatedly touted as the end goal of Blue Origin. If we had a trillion humans, we would have a thousand Einsteins and a thousand Mozarts and unlimited, for all practical purposes, resources and solar power.

By his own admission, Bezos modeled his dreams on the work of Princeton physicist Gerard ONeill, whose 1975 NASA Summer Study program conceived of enormous toroidal or spherical spacecraft capable of sustaining life. These spinning megastructures, analyzed in great detail in Space Settlements, were to feature rolling pastures, lakes, and picturesque hill towns; a slice of Alpine Austria churning through the vacuum of space and all of the colonial-era imagery that comes with it. Blue Origin even developed its own version of the ONeill cylinder, one populated with pastiches of Earthbound landmarks. His counterpart, Musk, wants to colonize Mars as a hedge to what he sees as an inevitable catastrophe, whether it be an asteroid or plague, without considerations of staving off these ills in the first place.

ButSpace Forcesdoes offer avatars of hope. The xenophilic books of novelist Ursula Le Guin, whoseHainish Cyclesees multiple humanities spread across the galaxy who explore solely for the enjoyment of new experiences, are placed alongside dealers of doom. Wernher von Braun, the Nazi who headed up the American space program after the latter defeated the former, is a curious mixture of the two.

Von Braun looms large in Scharmens study for his relentless advocacy of manned spaceflight and Martian colonization and is the closest thing to a main character the book has. The aerospace engineer oversaw the creation of the V-2 ballistic missile as a terror weapon at Hitlers direct order; the rockets were assembled by prisoners in the underground Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp, where 20,000 would ultimately die as slaves to fuel Germanys war economy. Resettled in America with a team as part of Operation Paperclip, von Braun quickly took to his adoptive homeland, publishing educational leaflets and science fiction stories that teased a near-future where middle-class Americans would live and work among the stars. He even worked with Walt Disney (himself a Leni Riefenstahl fan and tacit supporter of Nazi policies) on a series of films popularizing human space flight.

It was von Brauns ability to code switch, to say the right things to the right people at the right time, that kept him in the public spotlight for so long. On the one hand, he was spaces most effective salesman, relentless in his love for the subject. On the other, he lobbied the U.S. government to build an orbital overwatch station capable of deploying a nuclear payload anywhere in the world, putting mutually assured destruction overhead. Peace through security was always a core tenet of von Brauns ambitions, and his extended placement in Space Forces underlines a very real dichotomy at the heart of every epoch. Do we want to expand skyward for the sake of exploration, or as an expansion of empire? Even if the rockets carrying mankind toward Mars have peaceful intentions, can we ignore that they were built for bloodshed and by literal slave labor?

In the books introduction, Scharmen argues that we should understand moving off-world as colonization even if no one is being displaced. After all, somewhere in the chain of resource extraction, manufacturing, assemblage, and testing, someone is being immiserated (or as early science fiction writers admitted, enslaved). For Elon Musk or Jeff Bezoss utopias in the sky to be realized, people must be exploited. If Musk has his way, the first waves of travelers may be pressed into service as Martian guinea pigs to ensure the safety of the rich. And therein lies the rub, that funneling people into the furnace of progress is the only way forward, because its how weve always done things. Someone will always need to mine the asteroids and maintain the autonomous robots.

Space Forces is often not prescriptive, but at the books end, Scharmen reflects on the creation of the titular Space Force by former president Trump in 2019. He correctly surmises that sending the U.S. Armed Services into orbit will only induce greater militarization back on Earth, potentially ending in the extinction of the species. If the promise of space exploration is one of wholly new ways of seeing, designing, and interacting with the universe, why does it look like it always has back on Earth? Why are we carrying forward the same modes of thinking that so easily excuse human sacrifice? Why must a utopia for some be a dystopia for everyone else? Space Forces pulls back the sheen of space to reveal the dangers lurking within.

This article was originally published in The Architect's Newspaper.

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